Bruce McCormack in his essay/rejoinder Election and the Trinity: Theses in response to George Hunsinger, as I recall (I don’t currently have it to hand) identifies Thomas Torrance’s theological approach, and indeed, Hunsinger’s approach to Barth (following, largely, TFT’s approach) as Thomist. I think McCormack detects, at the least, a quasi-natural theology in Torrance, and in Hunsinger; but I want to focus on Torrance.

The thing is, I don’t fully disagree with McCormack. When you read books from TFT like his Ground and Grammar and Theological Science, we are confronted with his theological methodology; what he calls kata physin, or ‘according to nature.’ Here we come to see the sort of ‘critical realism’ that drives Torrance’s theological project. As we consider this, and cross-reference it with the approach of Thomas [Aquinas], it sounds eerily similar in orientation. I think we might adduce that TFT, on a sliding scale, slides towards scholastic [Aristotelian] realism, while it might be maintained that Barth is more at home in the nominalist world of covenant and language as that is driven by the ‘realist’ nature of the incarnation. But it is hard to discern some of these things in a neat and tidy way. TFT has sufficient Barth mixed in, particularly as that is focused by Barth’s reformulation of election and how that impacts a theory of revelation, that it makes it difficult to say that TFT is a Thomist in an absolute or even incidental sense.

Etienne Gilson, in his book The Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas offers a description of Thomas’ approach to faith and reason, and how that approach implicates his understanding on how knowledge of God obtains. Gilson writes:

All possible demonstrations of this thesis aim ultimately at throwing into relief the disproportion between our finite understanding and the infinite essence of God. The line of argument which leads us perhaps most deeply of all into the thought of St. Thomas is drawn from the nature of human knowledge. Perfect knowledge, if we accept Aristotle, consists in deducing the properties of an object by using its essence as the principle of the demonstration. Accordingly, the mode in which the substance of each thing is known to us, determines ipso facto the mode of the knowledge which we can have of the thing. Now, God is a purely spiritual substance; our knowledge, on the contrary, is only such as a being composed of soul and a body can reach. It originates necessarily in sensation. The knowledge which we have of God, is therefore, only such as a person starting from sense-data, can acquire of a being which is purely intelligible. Thus, our understanding, resting upon the testimony of our senses, can indeed infer that God exists, but it is evident that a mere examination of sensory objects, which are the effects of God and therefore inferior to Him cannot bring us to a knowledge of the Divine essence. There are, consequently, truths about God which are accessible to Reason, and there are others which exceed it.[1]

Compare the above with Thomas Torrance as he comments on Barth’s method:

Barth found his theology thrust back more and more upon its proper object, and so he set himself to think through the whole of theological knowledge in such a way that it might be consistently faithful to the concrete act of God in Jesus Christ from which it actually takes its rise in the Church, and, further, in the course of that inquiry to ask about the presuppositions and conditions on the basis of which it comes about that God is known, in order to develop from within the actual content of theology its own interior logic and its own inner criticism which will help to set theology free from every form of ideological corruption.[2]

Here we get a sense, not just of Barth’s own approach, but more pointedly, Torrance’s. We see the ‘kataphysical’ realism that attends Torrance’s theology as he refers to ‘the actual content of theology its own interior logic and its own inner criticism.’ I would contend we also see a sort of Thomist realism operative, maybe only insofar as Torrance agrees with Aquinas in the sense that the object under consideration ought to be allowed to determine its own categories and emphases of inquiry.

Where I think Torrance avers from Thomas is not so much in method, insofar as an a posteriori realism is present, but in the sense that Torrance, following Barth, emphasizes a relational-personalism in place of the brute substance/quality language that conditions Aquinas’ theologizing. So, this is where I am tentatively concluding at the moment: I think Torrance probably does slide Thomist in certain respects, but he reifies Thomism under the pressures of personalist and relational language such that he ends up sounding much more like Barth than he does Thomas. In other words, at a superstructural level, I think I actually do agree with McCormack (if I recall him correctly, which I think I do), and see Torrance more as a Thomist and less as a Barthian in some significant respects. [This has the makings of a PhD thesis]

[1] Etienne Gilson, The Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas (New York: Dorset Press, 1986), 41.

[2] Torrance, Theological Science, 7.